


Wisdom

by KnightedRogue



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-31
Updated: 2016-05-31
Packaged: 2018-07-11 08:31:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7040926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KnightedRogue/pseuds/KnightedRogue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's a shape of a name on Leia's lips.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wisdom

**Author's Note:**

> This is therapy, plain and simple. Six months after TFA and I am still struggling. My headcanon remains firmly in Legends, I think. So enjoy what I hope is my only foray into the official GFFA; I am but a tourist here. Spoilers follow for TFA.

It’s not enough to feel Han’s death. She feels Ben’s glee and sorrow, too, in equal measure. 

Leia sits, stomach in knots, breathless. 

She’s kidding herself if she feels surprise. She knows the depth of Ben’s fall. Not because she’s his mother. She knows because she stands at the opposite end of a war from him. 

Alderaani wisdom: one knows an enemy better than one knows a friend.

There’s bustle around her, a war she’s responsible for creating. For a long time, she felt she would never have to sit in the midst of such pandemonium again. But she’s here now, sitting on a crate while she watches a war-machine loom over her fledgling freedom-fighters like a gross reproduction of her own youth. And like before, she’s trying to compartmentalize a great personal loss.  


She closes her eyes.  


If breath would come, she’s not sure what she would say. Her mouth forms the shape of a name, such an important name, but her throat closes off now, too. She’s left mute. She can’t say the name, and perhaps that’s better, anyway.  


She should stand up. Attend to the war. She can grieve later.  


Instead her brain unlocks memories she had repressed: sense memories, visceral memories, the smell and taste and touch of that name on her lips. She remembers a bottle of wine and unforgettable nights. She remembers a home, strong arms, wit and courage. Decades of good, some years of bad.  


Corellian wisdom: a good man does not exist, only a great one with regrets.  


She opens her eyes, stands up. She needs to move.

 

 

They survive. Han didn’t. There are many witnesses, there is no doubt. She tempers the instinct to do so.  


How is it that Han is so very real to her now? Her husband, her goddamn husband with the kind eyes, the pawn of the Jedi, a man more controlled by forces he didn’t understand than by the gravity of whichever world he was on?  


Inexplicable Han Solo. Ever the reluctant, self-sacrificial hero.  


Back in her quarters, she feels her tongue loosen. The choke hold on her throat dissipates, and now it’s not her voice but her words that don’t work properly. The sounds she makes are not words. She thinks of her first night without Alderaan, and she remembers this now, too. How helpless she felt when she realized she could never talk to her father again.  


She is not used to feeling helpless.  


Alderaani wisdom: helplessness breeds contempt; usefulness breeds joy.  


Joy has not been a factor for some years now. She’d forgotten joy even existed.  


It had, for a long time. She remembers joy. She remembers the power of new love, the strength of older love, the wonder of parenthood.  


Corellian wisdom: real grief comes after real joy.  


Those Corellians. Always getting straight to the point.

 

 

Chewie leaves with the girl to go find Luke. Her old friend avoids her eyes, avoids her entirely. She is not sure if that is condemnation or grief.  


They need to move the base. She is sure Ben is alive and he knows where they are. There are logistics to organize. Plans to make. This is something she knows how to do.  


In spare moments, though, she remembers. Passion. Warmth. Friendship. The balancing act of family and work, the melody of companionship over the steady percussion of duty. Dual lives. Joy.  


There are more tears. Inconvenient moments of panic where her heart seizes and she is not sure why she has outlived everyone.  


But those moments wane and she presses forward.  


Chewie and the girl find Luke and bring him to her. And in her brother’s face she sees all the guilt that underlines her own grief. He doesn’t say much to her about Han, though he obviously knows. He is distant and she thinks – not for the first time – that he is a coward. It’s unkind. But then, so is she.  


The night after Luke arrives on-base, she dreams of Han. In her dream he forgives her for pushing him away. He looks right at her, those kind eyes so mischievous that it breaks her heart, and he tells her that she owes him one. When she asks him why, he smiles and then she wakes up.  


Alderaani wisdom: you awake from a dream knowing more about yourself than the universe.  


Corellian wisdom: dreams tell you what you want.  


She doesn’t know more about herself or the universe. She does know that she always wanted Han.

 

At some point, she understands that she will not outlive this war. It was a miracle she survived her first one. This one is not her fight.  


Is it strange that this is a comfort?

 

 

She thinks about the afterlife. Every society has one. Alderaani, Corellian, Jedi. Mostly it’s about peace. The next big transition. Seeing the dearly departed.  


The only person she knows who has personally dealt with spirits is Luke and he is not helpful. He speaks of great calm on a sea of ephemeral spheres, of a commune of Jedi who serve the light, of understanding and oneness with the Force.  


On the subject of non-Jedi he is tellingly mute.  


The fabric of her calm is tearing very slowly. She sees Han everywhere and her lips can’t stop forming that one shape.

 

There’s poetic justice in her end.  


No fanfare. No giant moment of sacrifice. But it’s in service to her family, to the son she hopes rises from the ashes of his own devastation. She sees, in his eyes, that she’s hit home, that her presence has reached him.  


And as far as she’s concerned, that’s all she could possibly hope for.  


Alderaanians and Corellians have different pieces of wisdom at the end of a life. She doesn’t think about those.  


There’s only a shape of a name on her lips. And while she has said many beautiful things in her life, she is very happy that that name is the last one.


End file.
